Рецензии на книги о Помпеях

 

Small D.B.

Рец. на: Laurence R. "Roman Pompeii: Space and Society"

Pp. xi + 158, pls. 23, figs. 13, maps 31. Routledge, London and New York 1994.

 

American Journal of Archaeology. Vol. 100. No. 2 (Apr., 1996). P. 430.

 

Some reviews are harder to write than others and this review is an especially hard one. For many years I have been an advocate of new approaches to Greek and Roman architecture, and on the surface, this book looked promising. Laurence provides us with some promising new methods of architectural analysis, and constructs an important foundational argument: the underlying social structure of Pompeii is analyzable through a study of its urban space. But, at the same time, the book has some fundamental shortcomings.

In nine chapters Laurence sets out to reanalyze Pompeii from this architectural point of view. After setting his analytical stance in the first chapter, ancient and modern town planning, he moves to chapter 2, public building and urban identity. Here he equates the identity of Pompeii with its major public buildings and traces important changes in this image from the pre-Sullan colony to local ideological transformations in the Early Empire. In chapter 3, Laurence tries to isolate neighborhood identities by using a combination of comparisons to neighborhood divisions in Rome, noting Pompeian distributions of altars to the Lares Compitales (identified with vici in Rome) and fountains. Chapter 4 treats the issue of urban production and consumption. Laurence notes the distribution of different types of workshops, ranging from bakeries tofullonicae throughout Pompeii. Chapter 5 is somewhat different from the others in his book, treating the issue of the location of deviant behavior (mainly prostitution) in Pompeii, and its spatial relationship to more respected spaces in the city.

Street activity and public interaction, chapter 6, contains Laurence's attempts to define activity and interaction by typing streets according to a scale of doorway and graffiti occurrences. Laurence extends this type of analysis in his next chapter, the production of space, by looking at the connection between the houses in the insulae and the streets themselves. Here he incorporates methods pioneered by Hillier and Hanson (The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge 1984) to determine the depth of a house and, by extension, its level of connection with the activity of the street. The important issue of the scheduling of activity within an urban space is treated in chapter 8, where Laurence outlines some of the basic activity sequences within a city, noting that areas of concentrated activity move throughout the town during the day. In his last chapter, on urbanism in Roman Italy, Laurence returns to his fundamental argument and restates that we need to move beyond tired Weberian concepts of producer or consumer cities toward understanding the ancient city as a patterning of social processes.

The new methods that Laurence has adopted for this work are laudable. I very much appreciated his distributional analysis of activity within Pompeii. In general, I have few quibbles with his methods, although I found his comparison of non-sampled data sets from Ostia, Rome, and Pompeii to betray little understanding of statistical reasoning, and his attempts to use both textual and archaeological data methodologically unsophisticated. What is unsettling about this book, however, is the fact that Laurence fails to use these new architectural techniques to elucidate Pompeian society, the important second half of his foundational premise. He presents no models of the social structure of Pompeii, models that would give purpose to his methodological applications. In most cases, we are left with spatial analyses that correlate with "insiders, outsiders, elites, commoners, et al.," social terms so unfocused that we are left wondering just what was the social structure of Pompeii?

Two examples will help explain this point. In attempting to arrive at an identification of neighborhoods, Laurence charts the distribution of public fountains, arguing that those who customarily use the same fountain would tend to develop a neighborhood social identity. But such a conclusion is unsatisfying and hardly approaches a reconstruction of Pompeian society. If we argue that fountains were a means by which identity can be manufactured, we have at least to begin with a rough breakdown of Pompeian society that identifies gender, class, status, etc. The power in looking at fountains would then come from asking what specific divisions of a town would be using the fountains, and how the fountains would give them a regional identity. If the frequent use of public fountains, and the interaction that took place at the fountains (another crucial issue Laurence overlooks), can create group identity, is this regional identity the same for men, slaves, women, patrons, and clients? A similar issue surfaces in his chapter on production and consumption. He rightly locates the areas of different types of production in Pompeii, but then does not take the issue to its logical conclusion and correlate this distribution with any concept of the articulation of the means or modes of production within the city. Are his insulated industries the products of household production? Are his more open industries operated by guilds? How does this pattern fit into a larger model of economic and social articulation within Pompeii? In short, Laurence uses new approaches to the spatial structure of Pompeii, but fails to deliver on the second part of his premise. We have space, but no "society".

It is, however, unfair to crucify Laurence on this cross of anthropology. While I have serious reservations about the success of his book, it has to be recognized that he is working within a field of research that is not equipped to answer the questions that he sets. Classical archaeology and ancient history, without a firm foundation in anthropological studies, will never be able seriously to come to grips with the fundamental questions of social structure, and will never be able to use the promising methods that Laurence applies to Pompeii to lead us further toward the urban past.

 

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